Has
rational ignorance impacted your organizations social media activity yet? Rational ignorance is the decision
not to become more informed about something because the perceived cost of the
additional intelligence in terms of both effort and expense is more than the
expected return on the knowledge gained.
It kicks in for most of us when we believe we have reached the point of
diminishing returns in relation to the value of acquiring additional insight. More than likely, your organization started
its social media journey with great excitement, and a willingness to invest and
learn; now most of your staff barely knows about the changes to the InMail policy
on LinkedIn, and it’s been weeks since they tweeted. The concept of rational ignorance, while
popping up on a daily basis for most of us, is particularly consequential to
the execution of a social media strategy because the social media ecosystem is still
evolving at a rapid pace. In short, we
now live in an age when the most important marketing skill set is the ability
to keep our social marketing knowledge relevant and up-to-date.

Yes,
as the saying goes, “there was a time.”
And indeed, there was a time, when knowledge of the 4 P’s of marketing
was a sound long-term investment and when campaign strategies seemed straight
forward and predictable. But that was
then and this is now. So, with the help
of Peter Senge book “The Fifth Discipline” here are
three resolutions for 2015 I intend to focus on in order to keep rational
ignorance from infecting my teams.

1. Build a stronger shared vision about social media:
Genuine caring about a shared vision is rooted in personal visions. I’ll be spending more time this year helping
each of my team members build and nurture an even stronger vision of the personal
branding benefits of social media. And
how those personal visions join to create our shared vision.

2. Declare my training support: Training is one of the most important ways
for a marketing team to keep their social media skills up-to-date. I’ll let my team know how vital training is
to me and personally conduct practice sessions to hone our social media process
and technology skills.

3. Enrollment not selling: I’m a salesperson at heart. That means I have a tendency to try to
“convince” my audience of the benefits of a vision. As I focus on vision and training with my
teams I need to make sure I turn down my need to persuade in order to let them have
time to develop their own sense of vision.

I’m
betting the year on a shared vision and building a learning organization. Where are you placing your bets?